Win·ter
Con·sum· er El·ec·tron·ics Show, The:
n. 1. Meeting and greeting place (Las Vegas, NV) for
high-end audio manufacturers, distributors, retailers, press, and
anyone else who can forge an audio company business card on their
PC. 2. Strange desert gathering at which nearly-catatonic cult
members wander about in seemingly random fashion, periodically
stopping to worship glowing glass bottles, rotating shiny black
discs, and someone named "HP" (likely the cult leader.)
The group has repeatedly failed in its attempt to have the name of
the show's locale changed from Southern Nevada to Sonic Nirvana.

The 2000 Winter
CES was noticeably more upbeat than the '99 event. With most
high-end audio manufacturers, distributors and retailers having at
least partially recovered from the Asian Flu, last year's anxiety
and long faces were replaced with less anxiety and slightly
shorter faces for the first show of the new Millenium (CES Tip #1:
No matter how good business is, audio manufacturers are never
happy. When meeting a manufacturer for the first time, ignore the
temptation to break the ice with phrases like "Boy, you guys
really got reamed in TAS last month" or "Who voiced this
speaker, Helen Keller?" Trust me, they won't be amused.)

Having formed
groovenoise just weeks before the show began, I was particularly
excited about the opportunity to spread the word to those in the
industry who had yet to hear about it - which was pretty much
everyone (one day I've got to take the

time to write up
one of them press release thingies.) Starting an analog
publication in 2000 was a dicey prospect, what with 17.3 channel
DTS-enabled, Dolby Pro-Logiced, DVD-ABCDEFG, SACD-capable,
MP3-compatible, Music-B-Damned players becoming all the rage. Much
to my delight, the majority of the manufacturers I spoke with
thought that an analog-centric publication was an idea whose time
had come. Of course, most of those people manufacture turntables,
tonearms, cartridges, phono stages or LPs, so the deck was stacked
in my favor. At this point, I'll take whatever I can get.

Lucky for us,
analog delights at the Alexis Park (Specialty Audio's official CES
home) and The St. Tropez, (home of the dastardly rogues who chose
to display at T.H.E. Show), were more plentiful than cabs at our
hotel (CES Tip #2: If you need to catch a cab in under a
half-hour, don't stay at a hotel without a casino. It seems most
cabbies avoid those like the plague.) My guess is that upwards of
20% of the rooms at this year's show housed a turntable, fully
setup and ready to go. This was in stark contrast to the '99 show,
at which the venerable slab-spinner appeared to be on the
endangered species list. This time around, turntable, tonearm,
cartridge, and phono stage manufacturers were plentiful and
prominent. Let's face it, in the age of digital everything,
putting your heart, soul and kid's college fund into designing and
manufacturing vinyl playback gear takes gonads the size of
Jonathan Valin's ego. Kudos to all of those who have busted their
humps to keep analog's head above water.